The Princess and the Goblin
A princess lives in a house on a mountain, is cared for by a mysterious great-grandmother, and is threatened by goblins who live underground. MacDonald wrote the book for children and filled it with theology, and the mixture is stranger and more interesting than that sounds.
The goblins are not simply evil; they are creatures who have been deformed by their own work. The grandmother is a figure out of dream rather than doctrine. The book influenced Lewis and Tolkien, and it is easy to see why: it treats the imagination as a serious instrument for understanding good and evil.
Public-domain status
First published in 1872. In the United States, works published before 1930 are in the public domain. In the European Union the general term is the life of the author plus 70 years; George MacDonald died in 1905, so this work has been free to republish there since 1976.
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Keep reading
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